Grizzly–polar bear hybrid

A grizzly–polar bear hybrid (also named grolar bear, pizzly bear, polizzly, grolar bizzly, prizzly bear, pizzly-grizzly, nanulak or Polar-Grizz) is a rare ursid hybrid that has occurred both in captivity and in the wild. In 2006, the occurrence of this hybrid in nature was confirmed by testing the DNA of a unique-looking bear that had been shot near Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories on Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Possible wild-bred polar bear-grizzly bear hybrids have been reported and shot in the past, but DNA tests were not available to verify the bears' ancestry.

Analyses of DNA sequences of bears have recovered multiple instances of introgressive hybridization between various bear species, including introgression of polar bear DNA into brown bears during the Pleistocene.

With many suspected sightings and three confirmed cases, theories of how such hybrids might naturally occur have become more than hypothetical. Although these two species are genetically similar and often found in the same territories, they tend to avoid each other in the wild. They also fill different ecological niches.

Grizzlies (and also Kodiak bears and "Alaskan brown bears", which are all subspecies of the brown bear, Ursus arctos), tend to live and breed on land. Polar bears prefer the water and ice, usually breeding on the ice.

The yellowish-white MacFarlane's bear, a mysterious animal known only from one specimen acquired in 1864, seems to attest that grizzly-polar bear hybrids may have always occurred from time to time. Another theory suggests that the polar bears have been driven southward by the melting of the ice cap, bringing them into closer contact with grizzly bears.

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